[throwaway2037]

    > spent 15 minutes filling jerry cans, and came back with enough energy to power my entire house for a week.

Wow, this really feels like a stretch!

How much fuel were you using to power your house for a week? I find it hard to believe you can pump more than 100 gallons of fuel in 15 mins.

    > in a continental or global disaster

Have you lived through any of these? If yes, can you provide a real world example, not a hypothetical scenario.

[_hyn3]

Diesel pumps in a truck stop (on the commercial side, where the big rigs fill up) are incredibly fast.

(Side note: I have noticed that the prices on the big rig side of a truck stop are usually slightly higher for the same diesel fuel!)

[dambi0]

In theory you can fill cans in parallel

[nucleardog]

Don't even need to...

First off, apparently gas pumps should have a flow rate around 8-10gpm. So 100 gallons is still only ten minutes of pumping.

But also... If you need 100 gallons to keep your house going for the week maybe, I don't know, try turning a couple (hundred) lights off or something for now?

Using 100 gallons over 7 days is 14.3 gallons per day. Assuming you can kill the generator while you're sleeping, figure 16 hours you have it running. So you're using 0.9 gallons per hour. Looking online, looks like for a gasoline generator ~6kWh/gallon is fairly typical.

So you're planning for, averaged out, a 5.5kWh draw continuously every hour you're awake.

If that's your typical power usage, you're looking at 5.51630.4 = 2,675kWh/mo, which at our electricity rates would cost me about $375 just in usage charges to buy from the grid (never mind the connection fees and stuff).

In reality we're using more like 4-6 gallons per day.

[nucleardog]

> How much fuel were you using to power your house for a week? I find it hard to believe you can pump more than 100 gallons of fuel in 15 mins.

Well, maybe you should have stopped after the question and we could have cleared up the confusion!

If I run the generator from morning to night with typical loads, I'm usually burning through about 5-6 gallons a day. So a week of fuel is 35-45 gallons.

Because I know "I actually did it" isn't a good answer, went and looked and the typical flow rate for a gas pump is supposed to be 8-10gpm. So... actual time holding the handle down on the pump, worst case, is about five and a half minutes.

> in a continental or global disaster, we’re quickly going to be unable to get our hands on gasoline without the drilling and refineries and distribution

Did you... disagree with that? Or are you just saying things to say things? Is there a big culture of backyard oil refining where you are? There isn't where I am. I didn't think I needed lived experience to say "if the refineries are shut down and the roads are impassible, oil products are going to be pretty hard to come by".